Haunted paintings

It's watching you!

We’re all familiar with tales of ancient portraits whose eyes follow you around the room, but haunted paintings come in all sorts of unsettling forms. Is there something to it, or is it just imagination?

The Hands Resist Him

One of the most famous haunted paintings of recent years is the eerily titled The Hands Resist Him, by Bill Stoneham, know by many as the haunted eBay painting… Back in 2000, the online auction site listed the work of art as for sale by its owner, who claimed that it had been causing disturbing paranormal occurrences in his home, and visitors reported feeling unwell when they looked at it. But, most chilling of all, the two figures in the painting had been seen to fight with each other - and move around at night...

The Hands Resist him is a painting of a small girl and boy, inspired by a photo take of the artist when he was a child, and a poem penned by his wife. Behind the two very sinister looking children can be seen several hands emerging from a dark window.

Stoneham, the artist, explains: “The hands were all of the possibilities… You were left with the question, ‘Are these disembodied hands? Are they dismembered, floating there in space? Or are they connected to bodies?'”

The anonymous bidder who won the painting on eBay had no strange experiences themselves - but, had this to say of people who had viewed the artwork on the Internet: "Experiences [reported] include an exorcist type of voice along with a blast of hot air like standing in front of an oven door. A new Epson printer that ate and mutilated page after page when the user tried to download images of the painting."​How long can you look at it for?

The Anguished Man​This painting is particularly gruesome, since the tormented author used his own blood as paint, before committing suicide.

He is said to haunt the artwork. One owner who kept the painting locked in her attic used to hear voices and crying coming from the room, and even saw a shadowy figure.

​When she died, her grandson inherited it - and experienced equally disturbing phenomena, including the same his grandmother had experienced, along with the feeling of something stroking his wife’s hair and his son being pushed down the stairs by unseen hands.

​Some paranormal events were even captured on film - check it out on YouTube, below.

​The Crying Boy

This famous painting I find very hard to look at for long - or even at all. Mass produced, the portrait of a weeping orphan was created by Italian artist Giovanni Bragolin. Reports soon emerged of nasty events happening to people who owned the print - in particular more than 50 devastating house fires.

Were the fires caused by the painting, or, since it was so popular, did the fact that so many people owned a copy mean the law of averages made it inevitable that some of these families would fall victim to house fires?

Perhaps, but then why was The Crying Boy the only item to escape the fires’ wrath in each of these cases..?